SQUIRREL!!!!

[ Welcome once again Insta-P readers. It’s always nice to have company around here. I’ll be in the garage tinkering with my car for much of the day – tinkering = replacing an engine in my strange world – but I’l come in from the cold and respond to points from time to time. ]

Did anyone else just hear the “bump-bump” of the Jones bus running right over the infamous Hockey Stick?

Dr. Phil Jones, the man at the center of the Climategate scandal, has for the first time admitted that the Medieval Warm Period could have been warmer than the present day, flying directly in the face of the stupid HockeyStick Graph that caused so much of the Climate panic in the first place. From the BBC report, titled “Climate data ‘not well organised“:

Phil Jones, the professor behind the “Climategate” affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.

He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics – a decision he says he regretted.

But Professor Jones said he had not cheated the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.

He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.

But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period.

Here is why that is important. If there was a warmer Medieval Warm Period, then the current warming could be more likely due to natural variation, instead of CO2 and man-made. as the models don’t account for this earlier warmer condition. At the very least, the “certainty” and of doom and gloom warming predictions is overstated, as the world may have been warmer and the world didn’t end.

These statements are likely to be welcomed by people sceptical of man-made climate change who have felt insulted to be labelled by government ministers as flat-earthers and deniers.

Yes, in fact, it does. Thank you Dr. Jones for finally being honest. I sincerely wish it didn’t have to come to this point where your life is in turmoil. Let this be a cautionary tale to others. Just be honest and open, and this kind of thing would be avoided.

PS. There have been some questions as to the source of the graphs in this post.

The first graph is Mann’s Hockey Stick. (if you don’t know this one, you have a lot of catching up to do on the research)

The second graph is the Hockey Stick temp presumptions vs the accepted temp record, pre-hockey stick, according to the IPCC 1990 and 1995 reports. (Link)

The third is from the cemetery where dead scientific ideas are laid to rest. Of course, this one seems to have the tenacity of a zombie, so it probably won’t be down for long.

So it’s back to the uncertainty principle, that you can’t tell a trend from a cycle with only a little data in time, owing to astronomical noise gain if you try; which was what the hockey stick meant to bypass. The hockey stick couldn’t be part of a cycle.

Well,it sure took Jonesy long enough to finally concede that the MWP just MIGHT have been warmer than the current period…considering that there are vast written records concerning how wine grapes were grown in England during that period to such an extent that French vineyard owners urged King Louis impose an import tariff on English wines since French wine drinkers found it preferable to French vintages…next thing you know,Jonesy will concede that Wellington MIGHT have defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.

“I sincerely wish it didn’t have to come to this point where your life is in turmoil.”

Given Jones’s (and Mann’s and Hansen’s and …) crimes against science, and the fact that we came close to crippling industrial civilization with draconian emissions cuts thanks in part to him, a little turmoil in his life is better than what he deserves. And the sneering, disdainful response he and his cronies gave to legitimate criticism in the past in inexcusable. I sincerely wish he loses his professorship and is shunned as an example of what happens when “scientists” forget what it means to practice science.

Phil Jones is to science what snake-oil is to water. Now that force of circumstance has impelled him to ‘fess up, we only hope that after a timely and public trial he and his peculating crew of Luddite sociopaths will face the consequences they deserve.

Does anyone know where the proof is that the proxy data is a good fit for the actual recorded temperature data? By just looking at the graph it’s not at all clear to me that the proxy data does a good job of explaining the recorded data. But there must be some sort of statistical analysis that proves it, right? Does anybody have a link to a paper on it or something?

Whoever said, “whomever created the second graph,” should not be nitpicking other folks’ grammatical constructions!

As for Dr. Phil, I’m not sure he is making an honest admission here as much as embarking on the ‘honest mistake’ defense. It’s a big story, nonetheless; part of it is watching Jones wriggle on his own self-interested hook.

IF we can have a scientist, whose funding depended on there being proveable Anthropogenic Global Warming, to admit it’s possible they’re wrong, can we hope that politicians, who believed this was going to be a boon to their coffers to finance all sorts of sundry items, will decide to not tax carbon? Nah, I doubt it. They’re searching for scientists, as we speak, to come up with different data.

Telemachus has it right: where are the data for these graphs? While I like what they are stating, I cannot reuse them unless there is data and either actual code or clear enough description of the algorithms to recreate these results.

AGW, is a giant fraud on a stick, in fact a hockey stick. Trillions of dollars hang in the balance if it can be rammed through. Follow the money and you’ll find a slavering, self righteous, rotund Nobel laureate – formerly an official in the US Government- cackling and stacking his coins.

This is nothing new. Several leading skeptics have been saying this all along with the data to back it up. However, pre-Climategate, the press refused to cover it. Only those like me who were interested enough to look at the science rather than news blogs, network TV, newspapers or periodicals knew this a couple of years ago.

What I need explained is that, if the Medieval Warming Period was not warmer than today, why did the Vikings name Greenland “green?” Why did they settle there? How could they have raised crops and cattle there? There’s undeniable evidence of multiple generations of people living there. The truth is that it was green. It was warm enough to raise crops and cattle there. That British Lord is right: People live in the warmer climates. Food grows in the warmer climates. Having a warmer climate is a good thing for people.

OK, Mr. Jones, so you are telling me after a decade or two of working with this data (you tell me how long you have been at this) you still couldn’t get the data “properly organised” to reach a conclusion you could substantiate in an open forum.

Your mommy did poorly with the toilet training, is it? Couldn’t be your fault, you virtuous scientist.

Er, the little science I have had made a point of getting the bloody data right and organized from the beginning, twit. I don’t “do” science as a job, but I run a business and if our data isn’t “properly” organized, we die, bankrupt. I guess you go on to the next grant monies that come from people like me.

It is my thought you are a bloody liar and charlatan, that you organized the data as you needed to so to promote yourself and ideas. You knew from some point on you were “poorly organized” but hid that, lest your income stream and position suffer.

Do you have even a faint appreciation of the trillions of dollars pissed away, the people unemployed, the useless regulations and tyranny of econazis which has occurred with your connivance, all so you could be a slightly Bigger Man? Do you understand what you have started?

You are not a Big Man. You are the tiniest of men, not just dishonest but unable to see past your petty dishonesty, how it would create an international mess. You have a very limited mind, no oracle are you. Your infatuation with yourself or simple mental limitations have created a havoc for so many people.

And you could have prevented it. You knew. Unlike a Bjorn Lumborg, you were silent and complicit. You have no honor, sir, nor concern for your fellow man. You are a walking falsehood. I hope God deals with you in that way, but whatever He decides is fine with me. What I would do if it were up to me is irrelevant, because it isn’t.

And if you want lots of graphs and the data sources, check out Wattsupwiththat, as you can get all sorts of good stuff. Lots of pretty graphs and some really great demonstrations of how the AGW crowd has been lying with graphs.

As my Uncle Joe used to say: Figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure.

And that about sums up AGW cultists.

REPLY: I’ve been a WUWT visitor since the beginning. Was one of the first to submit pics of a station. Yosemite. It gave me the perfect excuse to go hiking.

So, 1000 years ago came the medieval warming, by natural causes, which was followed 1000 years later – now – by the anthropogenic global warming scare. Cycles being what they are, shouldn’t we be taking steps to forestall a faux global climate crisis due 1000 years from now?

It’s almost as if someone is comparing a graph for Europe and a graph for the globe, and trying to make assumptions. Of course, no one is that stupid. =)

The medieval Warm Period was not global. It was largely confined to European latitudes, and includes the time period when charcoal fuel economies practically deforested the European continent.

Guess how much CO2 is produced by charcoal production. Yyyyep.

REPLY: I was wondering if someone would bring that up. The MWP was not just a European phenomenon. There is plenty of proxy evidence across the globe that shows that. But it disagrees with the “consensus” so every time someone would publish a study showing this, it would get blasted by the protectors of the AGW flame. See my post here.

It includes:
? The assertion “that the 1990s were the ‘warmest decade in a millennium’ and that 1998 was the warmest year in the last 1,000. … is often recited without qualification, and even without giving a source for the ‘fact’.”
? “The claim originates from a 1999 paper by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann. Prior to Mr. Mann’s work, the accepted view, as embodied in the U.N.’s 1990 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was that the world had undergone a warming period in the Middle Ages, followed by a mid-millennium cold spell and a subsequent warming period — the current one. That consensus, as shown in the first of the two IPCC-provided graphs nearby, held that the Medieval warm period was considerably warmer than the present day.”
? “Mr. Mann’s 1999 paper eliminated the Medieval warm period from the history books, with the result being the bottom graph you see here. It’s a man-made global-warming evangelist’s dream, with a nice, steady temperature oscillation that persists for centuries followed by a dramatic climb over the past century. In 2001, the IPCC replaced the first graph with the second in its third report on climate change, and since then it has cropped up all over the place.”
? “Al Gore uses it in his movie.”
? “In 2003, two Canadians, Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre, published an article in a peer-reviewed journal showing that Mr. Mann’s methodology could produce hockey sticks from even random, trendless data.”
? “three researchers — Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University — are not climatologists; they’re statisticians. Their task was to look at Mr. Mann’s methods from a statistical perspective and assess their validity. Their conclusion is that Mr. Mann’s papers are plagued by basic statistical errors that call his conclusions into doubt.”
? “Mr. Wegman brings to bear a technique called social-network analysis to examine the community of climate researchers. His conclusion is that the coterie of most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. ‘As analyzed in our social network,’ Mr. Wegman writes, ‘there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis.’ He continues: ‘However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility’.”
? “published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. ‘As analyzed in our social network,’ Mr. Wegman writes, ‘there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis.’ He continues: ‘However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility’.”
? “climate research often more closely resembles a mutual-admiration society than a competitive and open-minded search for scientific knowledge. …the dismissive reaction of the climate-research establishment to the McIntyre-McKitrick critique of the hockey stick confirms that impression.”

Don’t thank Jones. This was obviously a deal struck with the university. (I wondered what was going on when they didn’t fire him…) You need to thank those profit loving, cap and trade hating Russians. They did what WE SHOULD HAVE DONE, which was to expose the scam. A little computer hacking trickery and your lives and the lives of your children were saved.

Now comes the question of who is suing who for losses in wages, time, innovation, taxes….

The global temperature 1000 years ago has no bearing at all on the current conditions, and to whether or not: a) mankind is increasing atmospheric CO2, b) increased CO2 leads to warmer temperatures, c) this is a good or bad thing.

“REPLY: I was wondering if someone would bring that up. The MWP was not just a European phenomenon. There is plenty of proxy evidence across the globe that shows that.”

I didn’t say it was just a European phenomenon. But there’s no evidence it was global, a point you sidestepped.

REPLY: Are you kidding? There is lots of evidence that it was global. See here and here. I know you’re not going to like the source, but as you can see, each of the sites listed is backed by peer review papers from such denialists journals as Science, Scientific American, Nature, GRL, Climate Dynamics, and other bogus journals.